Remarks by the Vice President and Mrs. Cheney Followed by Question and Answer at a Coffee with Community Leaders
Hopper's Family Restaurant
Berrien Springs, Michigan

9:20 A.M. EDT

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Good morning, everybody.

AUDIENCE: Good morning.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Good to be back in Michigan.

MRS. CHENEY: Where we've spent a lot of time.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: We have gotten to Michigan quite a bit this
year, which is good, which we enjoy.

CONGRESSMAN UPTON: I want you to know that I told them that you
were with me at a Michigan game four years ago, but we were not playing
Notre Dame. We were not playing Michigan State, or -- (Laughter.)
It's okay.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: That was all right -- for a day. That's
right, that's right. (Laughter.) That's right. I was very careful
about that. But I've known Fred for years because we served together
in the Congress and in a various capacities since, so delighted to be
here in his district this morning and get a chance to spend some time
with him. We worked hard to train him, to teach him everything he
knows, bring him up right. (Laughter.)

CONGRESSMAN UPTON: (Inaudible.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: He's doing a good job. But what we usually do
at these sessions is have a chance -- I'll make a few remarks, and then
we open it up to questions so we can talk about what you'd like to talk
about, whatever is on your mind. And I'll try to answer questions.
Lynne jumps in sometimes, is an expert in some areas that I'm not. But
we'll try to keep it -- try to keep my remarks fairly brief. But I do
have a couple thoughts I'd like to share with you up-front.

The thing that's a little unique about it, of course, is the press
is here. And so you just need to remember that, whatever you say is on
-- (Laughter.) Say whatever you want, the point is, whatever you say
is on the record, and may be used against you. (Laughter.) Now, we
love the press. We love having them with us, and they're a very
important part of this process, so even if we occasionally gig them a
bit. But it seems that's only fair.

MRS. CHENEY: True.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Right. Well, I thought I'd take a couple of
minutes this morning, and one of the things I want to talk about in
this issue -- in this election, there are a lot of important issues,
obviously -- talked a lot about the economy. We saw the debate the
other night on domestic issues, and we've been talking a lot about
health policy and education, and a range of areas -- jobs and tax
policy and so forth that are important domestically, and in terms of
how we develop as a nation, making certain that all Americans have an
opportunity to take advantage of the tremendous privilege it is to be
Americans, and to get a good job and be able to take of their family,
and a quality education, and so forth. And all of those are very
important issues, and we'll talk about them some, as we do during the
course of the campaign.

But I also want to talk a bit about national security this morning,
partly because I think that -- maybe it's in part my own background on
these issues, but I just believe it is one of the most important
decisions we're ever going to make, and that is who is going to be
Commander-in-Chief for the next four years, and that we're at one of
those times that occurs occasionally in American history, where you
sort of come up to a watershed moment if you will, where there's a new
threat to deal with, and that forces us to develop new strategies for
defending the country, and sometimes new institutions and new ways of
thinking about how best to secure the nation against our enemies. And
I think we're at one of those periods now.

We had one right after World War II when the Cold War started and
we had to adapt to having to confront the Soviet Union. We had to
develop the policy of deterrence. We developed a whole new set of
weapons and our nuclear capabilities, created the Department of
Defense, created the Central Intelligence Agency, created the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization. We did a number of things that put in a
place a basic, broad strategy that was supported on a bipartisan basis
by Republican and Democrat alike then for the next 40 years, until the
end of the Cold War.

I think we're now at a point where we're having to establish a
similar strategy, another one of those break points in history, because
of what happened on 9/11; because of the nature of the threat we face
today; the fact that on 9/11 we lost nearly 3,000 people -- more than
we lost at Pearl Harbor, the worst attack ever on America. And it was
an attack carried out by a whole different set of individuals,
non-state actors, if you will, terrorists -- people who were committed
to die in the effort to kill infidels. And we're the infidels. And
the effort demonstrated the vulnerability of an open society, which is
one of our great strengths, one of the things we value about being
Americans, but how easy it was for a handful of individuals to come
into the country and with knives and boarding passes, in effect, launch
a deadly attack on the American people.

We also have to keep in mind now that, given what we've learned
since then, that the biggest threat we face is the possibility of a
terrorist group such as the one that struck us on 9/11 acquiring
deadlier weapons to use against us, specifically weapons of mass
destruction -- a chemical weapon, or biological agent, or a nuclear
weapon, and that they would be able to smuggle that kind of deadly
capability into the midst of one of our own cities and threaten the
lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, not just 3,000.

That's the ultimate threat we're faced with these days, and we have
to think about that when we begin to devise a strategy and a policy and
a set of institutions that we want to pursue going forward to protect
against that kind of an attack, and to guarantee the safety and
security of the American people well into the future. And that's what
we've been involved in, what the President has had to do since 9/11.
And we have, in fact -- believe we've developed such a strategy --
several component parts to it. Obviously, we did a lot to strengthen
our defenses here at home, created the Department of Homeland Security;
passed the Patriot Act to give law enforcement the tools they need to
be able to go after terrorists, same tools they already had for dealing
with organized crime and drug traffickers; Project BioShield, which
authorizes the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes
of Health to spend a considerable amount of money developing defenses
against biological weapons. And we've taken a whole series of steps
that make the U.S. a tougher target.

But we also made another key decision, and that was that there's no
such thing as a perfect defense; that we could be successful 99 percent
of the time, and given the nature of the threat, if they get through
only one time in a hundred, or one time in a thousand, that's
unacceptable. We cannot tolerate a situation in which we got hit with
those kinds of deadly weapons. And so the President made the decision
that it was not enough to have a good defense. We also have to go on
offense. And that's a key proposition for us. By going on offense,
what we've meant and what we've done is to go after not only the
terrorists -- wherever they plan and train and organize, but also go
after those who support terror, especially states that sponsor terror.
And there are a number out there that have done it. Afghanistan comes
immediately to mind, where they've provided a safe-haven for al Qaeda,
they provided an area for training camps, where the al Qaeda trained
perhaps as many as 20,000 terrorists in the late '90s. They've been
subsequently spread out around the world and launched attacks a number
of different places.

We went in and took down the Taliban government. We've closed the
training camps. We've captured or killed hundreds of al Qaeda in
Afghanistan. And now we're in the business of the next phase of the
strategy, and that is you've got to stand up something to replace what
you took down. You can't simply go into Afghanistan, take down the old
Taliban regime and leave. You'll just have chaos in your wake, and it
will again become a failed state, again become a breeding ground for
terror. So it's very important we set something up there to replace
what we took out, and that's the process we're in right now.

Of course, the remarkable thing is that the Afghan people have now
registered 10 million people to vote, almost half of them women --
never before happened in the history of Afghanistan. And on last
Saturday, less than a week ago, they held the first election in the
5,000-year history of that country. They got a democratically elected
government -- will be place by the end of the year, absolutely key part
of the strategy. And that's the end-state that we've got to -- got to
achieve. (Applause.)

In Iraq, a slightly different set of circumstances, but there what
we had, of course, in Saddam Hussein, was a man who had previously
produced and used weapons of mass destruction, both in the war against
the Iranians and against the Kurds, a man who had a long record of
starting two wars. He had a long record, as well, as a state sponsor
of terror. He's been carried by our State Department on the list of
state sponsors of terror for some 15 years. He had provided safe
harbor for Abu Nidal, for Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And he also had
been making $25,000 payments to the families of suicide bombers that
would kill Israelis.

And he had a relationship with al Qaeda. You can go back and look
at testimony by George Tenet, director of the CIA, before the Senate
foreign relations committee two years ago in open session where he laid
out a history of the 10-year relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq.

So we went in and obviously took down Saddam Hussein's government.
He's in jail. He'll, in the not too distant future, go on trial for
the many crimes he's committed. We're now in the midst of standing up
a new government behind to replace what was there. We've got the Prime
Minister Allawi in place now. Fred and I heard him address a joint
session of Congress here a couple of weeks ago. He's a good man, a
very tough customer.

They've only been in business, this new Iraqi government, a little
over 90 days. We had people out there wringing their hands saying it's
never going to work, they can't possibly pull it off. That's what John
Edwards said two-and-a-half years ago about Afghanistan, but we pulled
it off, in terms of we got through that election, and I don't want to
underestimate for anybody how difficult these challenges are.

This is a hard thing to do, to go into a country that's been living
under a brutal dictatorship maybe for centuries, and, in effect, stand
up those institutions and give people the opportunity to have a
representative government but that's exactly what we're doing now in
Iraq. They'll have elections in January. That will elect a
constituent assembly to write a constitution, then hopefully by the end
of next year, they will have elections under that new constitution and
have a democratically elected government in place in Iraq, just as we
soon will have in Afghanistan.

The other key component of the strategy is not only do we have to
get the Iraqis and the Afghans to take responsibility for governing, we
also have to get them to take responsibility for their own security,
and we're doing that in both countries by spending time and effort
training and equipping their own security forces. We will have in
Iraq, by the end of this year, 125,000 Iraqis who have been trained and
equipped to take on major responsibilities for their own security,
including police force, border force, regular military, and doing the
same thing in Afghanistan as well, too.

That's the course we're on, the strategy we've got to pursue. I
guess a couple of comments I would make about it. One is, these kinds
of operations always have costs, and the costs are borne most
especially by our military and our military families. They're the ones
that are doing the heavy lifting for us and we owe them an enormous
debt of gratitude for what they do for all of us. (Applause.)

But I think there are a couple of things we can say about them, and
even given the sacrifices that are having to be made now, that if we
were to turn our back on this threat, if we were to pull back and try
to be safe and secure behind our oceans and not aggressively go after
the terrorists and those who sponsor terror overseas, I think we'd make
a serious mistake. We'd sort of revert back to where we were
pre-9/11. That would put us in a place where, as long as we delay, or
the longer we delay addressing these issues overseas, the greater the
likelihood that the terrorist threat will grow, the greater the
likelihood that they'll get off more attacks against us, the greater
the likelihood that they'll acquire deadlier weapons to use against
us.

And John Kerry said something on Sunday that I found very
disturbing. He was interviewed in The New York Times, in the Sunday
magazine, and he talked about his hope of being able to get terrorism
back to the point where it was just a nuisance, and then he compared
that, he said, you know, like with respect to illegal gambling or
prostitution. And I thought about that, and I asked myself, well, when
was terrorism ever a nuisance? It certainly hasn't been since 9/11.
But was it a nuisance four years ago this week when they hit the USS
Cole, nearly sunk it and killed 17 of our sailors? Or six years ago,
when they hit simultaneously two of our embassies in east Africa and
killed hundreds, including a number of Americans? Or maybe it was
1993, the first bombing of the World Trade Center in New York? Or
1988, December, when they blew Pan Am 103 out of the skies over
Lockerbie, Scotland? Or maybe Beirut, 1983, 21 years ago this fall, to
the month as a matter of fact, when they blew up the barracks over
there and killed 241 Marines?

Q (Inaudible.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: From Camp Lejuene.

There's never been a time in my mind when I've wanted to think of,
or I think we can afford to think of terrorism as a nuisance. That's
just an unacceptable mind set. That says to me, somebody who believes
that you can, in fact, treat terror like that, that our objective ought
to be somehow to get it to be in manageable proportions, and that's not
our goal. Our goal is to defeat and destroy the terrorists wherever
they are. That's absolutely what has to happen. (Applause.)

So I think when we think about this mission and what is required
here and what we need to have in a Commander-in-Chief, to be able to
make the decisions that he has to make for all of us, and these are
very tough decisions, but also, his ability to lead, to earn the
respect of our troops who are the ones doing the heavy lifting, you've
got to have a President who's steadfast, who knows what believes and
means what he says and says what he means, somebody who doesn't
vacillate with the political winds, doesn't blow hot and cold -- one
day he's for sending the troops in Afghanistan -- into Iraq, and the
next day he's against providing them with the resources they need once
they get there. That kind of vacillation says to me a lot about lack
of character, at least the kind of character I think we have to have in
a Commander-in-Chief who's going to make these tough decisions and see
this forward to victory.

The way we honor the sacrifice that has already been made by so
many is to complete the mission. That's the single most important
thing we can do, and from the standpoint of our families and the
standpoint of the safety and security of the nation, there is no doubt
in my mind but what we'll be far safer and more secure long-term if we
actively and aggressively go after our adversaries than we will if we
sort of hunker down here at home and hope they don't hit us.
(Applause.)

John Kerry's record, he's got one, it goes back some 30 years, 20
years of that in the United States Senate, just says to me this is not
a man who's prepared to make those kinds of decisions and to
effectively command the power and might of the United States to go
after adversaries. And he's tried to obscure that record during the
course of the campaign. He doesn't want to talk about it. We've heard
some tough talk during the course of the debates and campaign, but you
can't hide a 30-year record where he's been out there voting in the
United States Senate, and before that campaigning for office in the
1970s when he ran for Congress the first time, he said we should not
commit U.S. troops without first getting the United Nations approval.
In 1984, when he ran for the Senate, he was opposed the most of the
major weapons systems that were put in place by President Reagan and
were instrumental in our victory in the Cold War, and then subsequent
uses in other conflicts.

1991, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. We had a vote in the Senate
and in the House authorizing the President to use force, to go expel
the Iraqis from Kuwait, and we did it with U.N. approval at that point;
they'd signed off on it. We had 34 nations that had been signed up and
committed troops to go alongside it. And even with all of that kind of
international support, John Kerry voted no. He was opposed to
Operation Desert Storm.

I don't think you can construct a set of conditions under which he
seems to be willing to make the kind of tough decisions that are
required to use U.S. military force when it's in our national interest
to do so. He's always got an excuse. He finally, this time around, of
course, on Iraq, voted to send the troops in harm's way, but then a
short while later, came under some heat in the Democratic primary
because he was running against Howard Dean, who was running as the
anti-war candidate, and he decided he needed to cast himself as the
anti-war candidate, so having voted to commit the troops to combat, he
then turned around and voted against the resources they needed to do
the job once he put them there.

I don't think you can afford to have as Commander-in-Chief a man
who has that kind of tendency to, in effect, blow with the political
winds, and to recast his position on the pressures of the moment. It's
absolutely essential for us to have a President who is steadfast and
courageous, and for the troops, for the American people and for our
adversaries to know what the position of the United States is, and I
say, I haven't seen that in John Kerry. (Applause.)

Well, anyway, I think the decision we make on November 2nd strikes
right smack at the heart of that proposition, that the American people
need to have in mind those kinds of considerations when they decide who
they want to have as Commander-in-Chief for the next four years, and
remember that it's not enough just to look at what somebody may say
during the course of a 90-minute debate. You've also got to look at
the track record, that in this case, with Senator Kerry goes back
nearly 30 years. And it's not a record that inspires confidence.

So with that, I'll stop, and be happy to respond to questions. I
say, Lynne is here and she's eager to participate. (Laughter.) So
thank you all for being here this morning. (Applause.)

CONGRESSMAN UPTON: Well, Dick, we're delighted to have both of you
back to our district. We assembled this august group of folks and
they've all got a couple of questions. And we will start. Mary -- was
a neighbor of mine that lived across the street when I was growing up
and she will have the first question.

Q Mr. Vice President, I am concerned about the future of Social
Security, and I've heard a lot of different plans that are being
advocated to solve our -- the coming fiscal crunch. And I just wonder
what you would suggest as a solution. I've heard about privatized --
privatized -- you know what I mean. (Laughter.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Personal. We call them personal retirement
accounts.

Q Yes, personal retirements accounts. And I wonder if you
think that that is a valid solution.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Sure. Well, where we're at in Social
Security, I think it's important to emphasize this for people. But
Social Security is sound from a financial standpoint to the current
generation of recipients and probably for the next generation of
recipients as well, too, those who are approaching retirement age now
in their 50s.

The concern that a lot of us had is that when you look farther down
the road, and if you were 20 or 30 years old -- which, obviously I'm
not; I passed beyond that some time ago -- but that our children have
legitimate concerns about whether or not the Social Security system
will be there when they need it. And that's where there are legitimate
questions and the questions arise primarily because most of the experts
who have looked at it will tell you that at this stage, the level of
benefits that have been promised to the number of people that we can
anticipate reaching retirement age exceeds the resources that will be
in the system at some point down the road. There used to be a debate
over exactly when that will occur, but there's no question but what
there is a long-term problem with respect to Social Security that needs
to be addressed.

John Kerry's approach, I think, basically is to put his head in the
sand and not want to deal with that. And what we've said, in effect,
what the President said and has talked about and we've talked about
during the campaign and we'll continue to work on in the next four
years, is that we think it makes sense to give people an option, that
younger generation. And we're not talking about anybody who's already
in the system, already drawing benefits they've paid in over their
lifetime, and their benefits should not be altered or affected, nor
should those who have been paying in most of their lives and are
getting close to retirement age now.

But for that younger generation, we need to give them an option, an
alternative, and the alternative we've talked about is the idea of
allowing them to take a portion of their payroll tax and have it go
into what we call a personal retirement account, and in effect, would
become their account, and would have to be invested in some approved
plan, but you could generate a higher rate of return that way than you
can simply by putting it in the Social Security account. That begins
to help close the financing gap that you're going to run into
long-term.

It's also in keeping with the notion that the President and I
believe very deeply in, that we want to try to give people more control
over their own lives. Right now, of course, once you pass away,
whatever you put into the Social Security is gone. It's not yours.
It's not assigned to you personally. So the idea of a personal
retirement account is that there would be something left there that you
could pass on to your heirs. And furthermore, that it gives people
more control over their own retirement situation than would be the case
today.

Again, voluntary, up to them, they don't have to take advantage of
this kind of an approach if they don't want to. But we think it's in
keeping with what we'd like to do in a lot of other areas as well, too,
and we think it's the right way to begin to address this issue. There
are obviously a lot of detailed questions that haven't been worked
out. They would have to be approached on a bipartisan basis. Social
Security is one of those issues that you can't resolve or pass
legislation on until you've got both parties generally on board to
support it. We went through the exercise -- I don't remember whether
you were there or not, Fred, back in 1983 when I was in the Congress,
we had a situation where Social Security --

CONGRESSMAN UPTON: Still in high school. (Laughter.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yeah, right. (Laughter.) But where we had a
situation where the system was literally about to go bankrupt, and we
had to fix Social Security at that time and we got it done. And when
we got up to the moment of crisis, then we had Alan Greenspan was then
the Chairman of the commission that pulled together a set of
recommendations, and we did, in fact, address it and make some changes
that were essential to make the system whole and to be able to provide
to provide those benefits.

So that's the general approach we think makes sense. We think it's
a realistic way to begin to address some of these issues, and so that's
the kind of thing we'd like to approach in the second term.

CONGRESSMAN UPTON: We'll hear from -- speaking about high school,
we'll hear from -- who is a Lake Shore High School student.

Q Well, Mr. Vice President, as a student athlete, I am very
concerned about the current method of enforcing the Title IX
legislation. Now, Title IX is clearly an important law with a very
admirable goal. However, the current method of determining compliance
with this law uses a test of proportionality, which is causing many
schools to drop men's athletic programs.

My question to you is, when reelected, what will your
administration do to help make sure that the true intent of the law is
brought forward and where would you stand on the issue of
proportionality?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we've -- let me buck some of this to my
wife, Lynne, who is an expert in some of these fields more than I am.

MRS. CHENEY: And a great fan of women's athletics as well.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: That's right. (Applause.)

I think everybody that I've discussed the subject with thinks that
Title IX has made significant contributions to creating opportunities
out there for women athletes. And the world has changed a lot in --
well, since I was a youngster as young as you are, in terms of the
extent of opportunities that are there for women, from a standpoint of
sports and athletic endeavors. Now, you got -- that's been very
important. The principles that are embodied in Title IX, we believe,
are very sound.

There has been this debate over how it's actually enforced and
implemented. I know Denny Hastert, Speaker Hastert, has spoken many
times on the subject. Denny used to be a wrestling coach before he
became a politician down in Illinois. And wrestling is one of the
programs that's been hard-hit as the schools have tried to adapt and
meet the requirements and the guidelines of Title IX. And so a lot of
great wrestling programs I know have been canceled -- it has been a big
problem in colleges and universities as well, too.

We'll continue to look at it. There was a commission set up, a set
of recommendations that need to be effectively enforced. And the
President has made it clear he wants to do everything possible with
respect to the way we actually carry out Title IX so that it works as
intended and doesn't have adverse consequences. It shouldn't be in the
business of denying athletic opportunities to anybody. It ought to be
operated in such a way that it creates the maximum number of
opportunities for as many people as possible.

And there are various formulas that can be used to try to make
certain that the intent of the act is carried out. So we'll continue
to work on it and push on it, and I know Senator -- or Speaker Hastert
continues to be deeply interested in it, as well.

CONGRESSMAN UPTON: I'm a supporter of wrestling, as well. We'll
hear from Troy. Troy is actually a candidate for county commissioner
here in Berrien County.

Q How you doing? Sorry, this cold is killing me. Mr. Vice
President, Mrs. Cheney, I am excited about all of the African Americans
that are coming to the Republican Party. (Applause.) I want to know
from you guys, is there -- are you -- is the campaign making a big
push? What exactly are they doing to bring more minorities over to the
Republican Party, and is there still more work to do, obviously?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I think there clearly is still more work
to do. I think the President, when he was governor of Texas, worked
hard in this area and had considerable success, both with respect to
the African American community as well as with respect to the Hispanic
community. And he got, I recall, over 50 percent of the vote when he
ran for reelection in Texas among Hispanics, for example, and not that
high, but probably upwards of 20 percent of the vote with respect to
African Americans.

Last time around, four years ago, we didn't do as well as we would
have liked. The -- we ran into some difficulties. I felt frankly that
-- well, I'll be careful here; we've still got election to go. I won't
name names of groups, but that, I guess, the argument that I would make
on the notion of why people of all races ought to be supportive of the
President and his administration is that he is working at and
addressing aggressively those issues that are most important, in terms
of people achieving true equality in our society.

I think of things like education, and it's something that he
believes in very deeply, and it was the very first priority we had when
we got to Washington and something we introduced as HR 1 and that was
the No Child Left Behind Act. And that came out of the President's
experience in Texas, where we had a public school system that frankly
wasn't working very well, and what he talked about as the soft bigotry
of low expectations, that we didn't have standards established, we
didn't test to those standards, we didn't have accountability in the
schools, with parents and with communities, so that we knew how
individual schools were performing and how individual students were
performing as well, too.

He brought that concept to Washington, passed No Child Left Behind,
got bipartisan support for it, had Ted Kennedy on board, among others.
And it's now the law of the land. And we've done it. We've got fairly
well established now in elementary levels and we want to take it now in
the second term to the secondary level as well, too, that principle of
regular testing and standards and accountability at the high school
level.

It's important because you cannot, I don't think, make progress in
improving public education in this country -- and Lynne and I are both
products of public schools -- unless you measure progress. Like
anything else, if you don't know where you are, you can't figure out
how to get where you want to be.

So it's been an important principle for us, and what we're
beginning to see now as well is that the results coming in are
beginning to suggest we're starting close the achievement gap. There
has been a so-called achievement gap in the majority of the population
in minority students, in terms of reading and math scores, for
example. We're beginning to make progress in narrowing that gap.

And I think the best single thing we can do, from the standpoint of
making certain that all Americans, regardless of race or ethic
background or economic circumstances have a shot at the opportunities
that ought to go with American citizenship, is to start first, last and
always with a first-class education. And if we give somebody that to
begin their lives with, then they'll be able to take advantage of all
the opportunities out there.

And the other thing I'd say, with respect to the President is,
we've

got some tremendous folks from the African American community, who
are my colleagues in the administration: the Secretary of State, Colin
Powell; Condi Rice, who's the National Security Advisor; Rod Paige,
who's Secretary of Education; Al Jackson, who runs the HUD. This is an
administration that I think has done a better job than anybody else,
not just at talking about opportunity, but going out and hiring people
based on talent and ability, regardless of racial background, and it
shows.

CONGRESSMAN UPTON: And still today -- great answer. Thank you --
(applause) -- the closest he's ever been to a famous person was
watching General Patton drive by in a jeep, so --

Q General MacArthur. (Laughter.)

CONGRESSMAN UPTON: MacArthur -- I'm sorry.

Q Your dad was --

CONGRESSMAN UPTON: Right, right.

Q -- Patton. (Laughter.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: That was a different theater.

CONGRESSMAN UPTON: I stand corrected. Bill is a leader of our
veterans here in Berrien County, and he's a great, great guy.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Served with the 1st Marine Division on
Guadalcanal?

Q Yes. In fact, Mr. Vice President, we were on a patrol when
General MacArthur went by in his beautiful jeeps. Ours was all dirty,
and we didn't stand at attention, and we got reamed out. (Laughter.)
When he came back, we were at attention. We were still dirty, but we
were at attention.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: That's good.

Q So I'll be at attention for you.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, that's all right.

Q Okay, during the Korean War, I took part in the capture of
the South Korean capital of Seoul. At 54 years later, Seoul has 12
million thriving people, but 35 miles north is the DMZ, where over a
million communist North Koreans are ready to attack. My question is,
what is the administration's plan to resolve this situation?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, North Korea is one of the -- I'm trying
to think how to describe it -- one of the ugliest regimes in the world
today. It is just a huge gulag is one way to think about it. They do
have massive prison camps in North Korea, but the population is
starving. Their economy is non-functioning. One of the most dramatic
things you can do is to look at a satellite photo taken at night from
space of the Korean Peninsula. And the bottom half, the 38th Parallel
and below is brightly lit; it looks like downtown Los Angeles or
Chicago.

Q (Inaudible.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Probably -- probably can. (Laughter.) But if
you go north of the DMZ, it's absolutely totally black -- no power, no
lights. It is a tragic place. And the thing that always strikes me
about it is what does it say about the man who rules North Korea that
he would treat his people so callously as he does. He is now committed
to trying to develop nuclear weapons. He's kicked out the inspectors
that he'd agreed to earlier. He'd entered into an agreement back in
'94 with the Clinton administration and then almost immediately began
to violate it. When we came into office, we discovered that he had a
secret uranium enrichment program going to build nuclear bombs, and
that -- they admitted as much when we confronted them with it.

Now what we're doing, we have a series of talks underway. The
Chinese have been very helpful and supportive in this regard, as well
as the South Koreans, the Japanese, and the Russians, and the U.S.
We've had about three sessions now as I recall of the group of six
conveying to the North Koreans that their only option if they want any
kind of normal discourse with the rest of the world is to give up their
aspirations to develop nuclear weapons. And that's the current status
we're at.

The U.S. is still fully committed to the defense of South Korea.
South Korea is a great ally. We are repositioning our forces on the
peninsula, and since 1953 when the Korean War ended, we've had our guys
right up next to the DMZ; the Second Division basically has been
stationed over there all that time. And now we're repositioning them,
pulling them back, farther down the peninsula so they're not right up
on the DMZ. But we're fully committed to the defense of South Korea.
We're substituting new technology and new equipment that will make us
even more effective over there than we have been. Plus the South
Koreans now, one of the more prosperous societies in the world, and
they've got a very good military. They're very well trained and well
equipped, and they operate very effectively with us. So I don't -- I'm
not concerned about the security of South Korea. I think they're in
the good shape. And the North Koreans would be nuts to try to pull
anything off there.

But it is -- the biggest concern we have right now is to get him
off this stance that he wants to acquire nuclear weapons, because down
that road lies -- I just think a dead-end for him, and having the
Chinese on board is crucial because they're their number one trading
partners. They share a huge border with them. And I say, the Chinese
to date have been generally pretty supportive to work with in this
area.

CONGRESSMAN UPTON: -- part of a multi-generational family farm
operation.

Q Fruit farmers. Just pull it up a little bit.

And I'm glad that the President talked about immigration the other
night. I agree with you that security is the number one issue in this
campaign, but in my business a work force is, too, and that we rely, as
with other industries, on Hispanic workers. So where is the balancing
act in tightening up to keep the bad guys out, and also supplying a
work force?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we think the two go hand-in-hand, that
is to say that what we have today is a situation where we have a large
number of immigrants coming into the country illegally -- some
primarily for economic reasons, because they can make more money here
than they can in Mexico or Central America, and that's a very strong
driver. People want to take care of their families. But what has
transpired in the past is we'd end up with a large number of folks in
the country illegally. We don't know what they're doing while they're
here. We don't know when they leave. And that's a great worry if, in
fact, someplace hidden in that flow of illegal immigrants would be
terrorists who mean to do us harm. So we've tried to tighten up on the
borders in Mexico. We've done a much better job. We've beefed up our
Border Patrol forces. We got new technology we've deployed down there
to deal with it.

The President's suggestion -- I think it's a good one -- is that,
in fact, what we ought to do is have a system to regularize that flow,
that we ought to recognize there is going to be this flow of folks
coming to the U.S. to try to work, that the way to deal with it is to
make certain that there's a process by which people can come in and
apply to come into the United States on a temporary basis, that they
would be allowed to come for a job where there was a job -- somebody
who wanted to hire them -- and where Americans weren't available to
take that employment, and come here for a period of time, and then
ultimately have to return back to their home country, but that it would
allow a guest worker program. We've had a version of guest worker
programs in the past in the West -- I know in California, in years
past, to support American agriculture. And at the same time, it would
regularize it in such a way so that we would know who is here. We'd
know how long they were here. We'd know when they went back. And so
you accomplish both your security objective, as well as your economic
objective at the same time by having a system that's better organized
than what we've got now. That's the suggestion that's been put
forward. And the President has offered it up as a recommendation.

Q Great idea, hope we can do it.

CONGRESSMAN UPTON: We have a very diverse district and diversity
is our strength. And one of those leaders is -- she has done a
wonderful job in lots of different ways. Welcome.

Q Thank you. Mr. Vice President, on Tuesday of this week, the
Annie E. Casey, Ford and Rockefeller foundations released a report
titled: Working Hard, Falling Short -- America's Working Families in
the Pursuit of Economic Security. And this report reflected the
struggles of the 9.2 million families in our country who are struggling
day-to-day known as the working poor. What promise do the next four
years hold for these families, which undoubtedly includes the 20
percent of Berrien County residents without access to health care
coverage, and the 40 percent of Benton Harbor residents who are living
below the poverty line?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well -- the best solution for poverty is a
job. And what most people want is a good-paying job that will allow
them to take care of their family, that -- one of the things we find,
for example, if you look at where -- we talk about the problem of
health care and health insurance, is that about 60 percent of the
people in the country who don't have health insurance work for small
businesses, and that small businesses simply cannot afford to provide
the level of benefits that would allow, for example, a family to be
covered with a good insurance policy.

So one of the things we want to do is to provide assistance to
small businesses, to be able to provide those kinds of benefits for
their workers. And the President has proposed a tax credit that would
allow a small business -- help the small business owner, in effect,
contribute the purchase of a catastrophic health insurance policy for
those employees. We tie it together with the health savings account,
which is something that we passed last year when we passed the Medicare
Reform Bill, this allows individuals to set up a health savings
account, to contribute to it tax-free to pay out-of-pocket expenses.
You could also allow the employer to contribute to that at the same
time. And it would be tied together with a catastrophic policy that
will cover the kinds of expenses, if somebody had a very, very serious
illness, had minimum premiums connected with it. And we think those
kinds of efforts would let us begin to target specifically people who
are working at minimum wage, or even a little above minimum wage, but
they're still not able to cover all their needs and requirements. And
so we think coming through the small business community, and through
HSAs is one way to go.

Obviously, Medicaid is there for people at the bottom end of the
scale. We'll cover them based on income level, and they can get access
to health care through that fashion, as well, too.

We come back again -- we think leaving, making the tax cuts that
the President put in place permanent is absolutely essential. One of
the things John -- (Applause.) John Kerry talks about rolling back the
tax cuts for the rich, but he ignores the fact that 900,000 small
businesses pay at that top bracket, that they pay into the personal
income tax. And they tend to be the companies that have got the
brightest future, the fastest growing. They create seven out of 10 new
jobs in this country, small business does. If we come in and we
increase taxes on that segment of our economy, we're going to dry up
jobs. We'll discourage investments. You won't have the kinds of
economic creation, of opportunities that would otherwise occur.
There's a fundamental difference of philosophy there with respect to
tax policy, and we think it's important that we do everything we can to
make those jobs available. And you can't do that by raising taxes on
those people who are basically providing the jobs and the opportunity.

We have to make America the best place in the world to work, to
have companies that want to expand and want to invest here, and that
means good tax policy. It means we've got to deal with the litigation
reform. I talked the other day with a guy who runs a company, a
manufacturing company in Minnesota. They've been in business 20
years. His product liability insurance is so high that if he didn't
have that bill to pay, he could hire another 200 workers for his
company, which has already got 900 workers connected with it. That
goes directly to the heart of the way our litigation system works. And
we have the cost of litigation built into everything we produce.
Another way to make our system more efficient and able to generate more
jobs and more opportunities is to address that question of litigation
reform.

And I come back again to education. Education is always the key,
and folks oftentimes who need the most help are the ones who haven't
had the opportunity to get an education that will allow them to take a
better job, or to be able to fulfill the requirements of a higher
paying employment. So we need to do everything we can there with our
training and assistance programs -- our job training programs to make
certain people get the skills they need so they can take advantage of
the private sector out there and move up the economic scale.

CONGRESSMAN UPTON: I've gotten the signal that we have one more
question left. And we're going to have -- ask it. She is a single
mom, day-care provider.

Q Actually, my question is concerning kids because that's what
my job is privately and personally. One is to follow-up on the
education issue. You've talked about educating our schools and our
teachers to help our kids. I also think that there should be some talk
about educating parents to help their kids, in that I know -- I have
three kids of my own that I have to take care of, that I have to push
along in school also, that I don't rely on the teachers to do that for
me. That's one question. That was a follow-up. That really wasn't
the question I had originally.

My question was on health care. My costs -- I am a -- I'm
self-employed, and I have a very high health costs that I have to pay
for myself -- my kids are taken care of, but me personally. And where
do we all stand on that, that the price of health care is astronomical
for everyone. And what are we doing about that?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: You want to talk about education?

MRS. CHENEY: Oh, you know, you're just so right about parents.
And that's such a good observation. It has occurred to me that one of
the reasons that No Child Left Behind is proving to be effective is
that for the first time parents can actually see how a child is doing.
There was this doctor in West Virginia that became a legend among most
of us who are concerned about education reform because he was a
pediatrician. And he noticed that all of the kids that were coming
into him, he would ask their parents, how are they doing in school, and
the parent would always say, above average. And pretty soon he figured
out it's not possible for everybody to be above average. It's that old
Garrison Keillor line, which in the real world doesn't work. And it
was because parents really didn't have access to accurate information.
You can't go to the school and say, help my kid more if you don't know
your kid is in trouble.

And what No Child Left Behind, I think, also does to encourage
parents to become involved is give them some power. If the school
fails, and fails, and fails, you can pick another public school. If
your school fails, and fails, and fails, you can get tutoring paid for
by public dollars. So I think that all of us need to -- and I sort of
encourage that idea of parent involvement. But I think in so far as a
government program can help, the No Child Left Behind --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: On the health care front, I had the experience
in my youth of having a job that didn't have any health insurance, and
got sick and ran up significant hospital bills.

MRS. CHENEY: It affected our honeymoon, as I remember.
(Laughter.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It was the year we were to get married, and
the honeymoon money went to the hospital to pay my medical bills. And
of course, the problem is far worse today because the cost is so much
higher. I think the quality of care is much better. We can do things
today that we couldn't do before. I'm living proof of that, but the
fact of the matter is, it's still a real burden out there for a lot of
folks. And I come back -- I don't -- you've got your own business.

Q It's self-employed --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Self-employed.

Q I -- day-care, a small day-care in my home that I run. But I
have to take care of myself.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Right. Well, one of the things we've talked
that I think has great merit is the notion of association health plans
where we would allow a group of small businesses to come together and
pool their resources and get the same kind of discounts for health
insurance that a big corporation can.

CONGRESSMAN UPTON: We passed that in the House. There are
problems in the Senate.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It hasn't gotten through the Senate yet. But
that's one of the ideas we put forth.

The whole area of medical liability reform we think is enormously
important. And the cost of malpractice insurance is driving up the
cost of health care all across the country. It's also restricting the
availability of care. I was -- where were we last night? We did a
rally --

MRS. CHENEY: We were Florida.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Florida, yes. (Laughter.) I have to stop and
think.

MRS. CHENEY: The weather was different. That's what I remember.
(Laughter.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: As I working the rope line coming out, there
was a guy there who is a doc, an OB/GYN. And he said, you've got help
us. We've got to -- the malpractice insurance is about to drive me out
of business. With medical liability we can begin to address those
issues. Again, we've gotten it through the House. In my state of
Wyoming, home state of Wyoming, we're seeing doctors have to close up
shop and leave because they can't afford the insurance. We can't get
new doctors to come in. The major malpractice insurance firm in the
country -- in the state pulled out. And all of that gets passed on
ultimately to the consumer in terms of cost. It means docs practice
defense medicine, and oftentimes order up tests that aren't necessarily
required, but they do so because they're worried about a lawsuit down
the road. And defense medicine -- that adds to the cost of everything
we do. So those are all problems that need to be addressed. And
medical liability reform we think would help a lot. We estimate
there's about maybe as much as $100 billion a year built into the cost
of health care in this country because of the way the medical liability
system works.

The key is to put a cap on non-economic damages, and we think also
to limit the size of legal fees to the lawyers who bring the suits.
And if we could do that, and it has been done in California with some
degree of success. I say, we've gotten it through the House. It's
been blocked in the Senate. John Kerry has voted against medical
liability reform about 10 times. And of course, John Edwards doesn't
believe in it. (Laughter.)

CONGRESSMAN UPTON: Well, Mr. Vice President, we know we want to
thank the Hoppers for putting their place here. (Applause.) We know
that you're never going to forget being in Berrien Springs for
breakfast. And with that, we are going to be on the -- I hear the
buses warming up in the background. We need to be on our way. But
thank you for spending a good amount of time with us this morning --

Q In Berrien Township.

CONGRESSMAN UPTON: In Berrien Township, that's right, that's
right.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you all very much for being here
this morning. We appreciate it, and there are always very valuable
sessions for us to find out what people are thinking about.